In Shakespeare’s plays, as in his world, travelling was often fraught with danger.
Of all the journeys his characters undertake, I think Thomas Mowbray’s is the hardest.
When Richard II banishes him, Mowbray doesn’t mourn his wealth, or his title as Duke of Norfolk. Not even his homeland.
Before he mourns any of those things, he mourns his language.
The language I have learn’d these forty years… 1
Mowbray got me thinking about identity, and home. In Shakespeare’s hands, we get this extraordinary cameo from a character who seems to understand that home isn’t simply where we happen to live.
Home is the place where our language resonates.
It’s where jokes don’t need explaining, where song lyrics touch something deeper than mere lexis ever can. The language of our thoughts, and dreams. It’s the dialect which infuses our idiolect.
Look again at Mowbray’s line:
Now no way can I stray;
Save back to England, all the world’s my way
He isn’t putting a brave face on things. This isn’t a sudden realisation of liberation, and he certainly doesn’t mean that the whole world has become his home.
He means nowhere is.
For me, it’s one of the most heartbreaking ideas in a play full of them.
Shakespeare returns to this question again and again. Othello serves Venice but never quite belongs to it. Shylock lives within its walls but remains outside its heart. Claribel is sent to a foreign court. Mortimer finds love in Wales, yet cannot even speak to his wife without an interpreter.
Where do we belong, in an age of easy travel, migration, and multiple identities?
It’s a question worth asking, but we shouldn’t look to Shakespeare for advice or solutions – only for different ways of thinking about the question until we begin to find our own answers.
Home, That’s where the hurt is..2
In ‘Walk On’, Bono urges us to ‘leave it behind’ Mowbray knows he can’t. For him, exile is speechless death, because some things cannot simply be packed away or left behind.
Language.
Memory.
A sense of belonging.
- Shakespeare quotations taken from https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org ↩︎
- Walk On, U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000) ↩︎
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